


5 People Natasha Frightened (and the 1 Who Cheered Her On)

by MissMorwen



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5+1 Things, All of the BuckyNat feels, Canon-Typical Violence, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, F/M, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Kissing, Maria Hill is a Good Bro, Minor Violence, Protective Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 18:59:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6436465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissMorwen/pseuds/MissMorwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Listen, lady. I know about your reputation, but you’re not scaring me.”<br/>He was wrong, of course he was. The Black Widow title wasn’t something one was given, it was something one earned. She would just have to teach him how scared he really should be.</p>
<p>***********</p>
<p>Exactly what it says on the tin. Natasha is a BAMF, frightening people (even when she doesn't mean to), luckily there's someone to cheer her on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5 People Natasha Frightened (and the 1 Who Cheered Her On)

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to [mbuzz](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mbuzz/pseuds/mbuzz) who gave me the title and betaed this fic. All I had to do was fill in the blanks.

1.

_"How could you do it, Наталья?"_  Madam B. sounded tired. More tired than she had ever sounded in all the years she had been Natalia’s teacher in the Red Room.

_"If I forged a strong bond with him, he was more likely to teach me everything he knew. Lust is an easy way to form a connection, you have taught me so yourself. And lust is easily mistaken for love,"_ Natalia lied, keeping face neutral and her stance at ease.

_"You were meant for someone else."_

_"And when I’m with him, I’ll make sure to forge a strong bond with him too."_ She didn’t want to, not now, not ever. All she wanted was to feel his arms around her, stronger than everyone else she knew and twice as gentle. But that wasn’t going to happen and she wasn’t going to let them see how much that hurt her.

_"That’s all he was to you? An opportunity to improve your skills?"_ Madam B. had to be testing her, she had never been sentimental.

Natalia shifted her gaze from somewhere above Madam B.’s head to her eyes. _"Love is for children,"_ she said, translating his words into Russian, her voice flat and even. It had been the only lie he’d ever told her, and not one he’d expected her to believe. She suspected that he had said it to protect her and now that they’d been found out, she used it to steel her heart. If she started to cry now, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

_"In all of my years here, you have been my best and brightest pupil. I had expected better of you."_

Natalia almost blinked in surprise. She was acting exactly like they had trained her to react – without feelings or remorse. If she had admitted to loving him, they would punish him harder for corrupting their weapon. She could not allow that.

Her anger got the better of her.

_"You taught me well, I am a weapon through and through,"_ she said. _"Isn’t this for the best? If I had developed feelings for the Winter Soldier, what do you think would have happened then? I am trained to kill by any means necessary; who knows how many I would have taken down with me."_ She let her voice go soft. _"Nothing short of a bullet to the head would have stopped me."_

Madam B. shifted her weight, like she had wanted to take a step back, but had stopped herself. Natalia probably wouldn’t have caught it if she hadn’t been studying her teacher so closely. _"That will be all, Romanova. You can report to Dr Fennhoff in the morning."_ Madam B. had a look of disappointment in her eyes, but her voice was hard.

Natalia hadn’t heard about Fennhoff before, but then she had never stepped this much out of line before. She wasn’t worried though, her feelings were locked away in a little box deep inside her. They weren’t going to get anything out of her.

 

2.

It took Natalia a day and a half to lose the tail after she finally realized somebody was following her. It was so impressive that it mostly just left her curious. How long had he been following her? Because even after she became aware of him, she had almost lost track of him a couple of times. He wasn’t using bugs or trackers, of that much she was sure. Her scanning equipment was top of the line – it had even located the supposedly untraceable one the Red Room had hidden behind one of her ribs.

So she turned the tables on him. She began stalking him. Not from many blocks away like he had, but up close and personal. Watching him in plain sight from across the street, or breaking into his hotel room and leaving traces of her perfume so he would know she’d been there. Never allowing him to catch her. Until finally she just showed up in his hotel room while he was sleeping.

With a knife on his throat, Natalia ordered the archer to get out of bed and sit in a chair she had placed in the middle of the room. He let her tie him to the chair, confident that he would break free if he wanted to. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to slow him down, so that one of his own arrows would be in his throat if he tried. And she told him that when he was secure, balancing said arrow on one finger. Not as a threat, simply stating the facts.

He only grinned in return.

“Why were you tracking me?” she asked calmly.

“I was sent here to stop you. To kill you. You have become too big a threat for the World Security Council to ignore.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“I— I saw you with that little girl, the one with the knee. And I saw you dance.”

Natalia didn’t think, just leapt straight up into the air, clutching an arrow in her fist. When she landed right next him, she plunged the arrow through the vastus lateralis on the outside of his thigh. No major blood vessels there, but it would make it pretty hard for him to chase her if she decided to bolt.

He somehow managed to stifle his reaction, his jaw only slightly tight when he looked down at his bleeding leg. “Ow,” he said in the most disinterested voice. “You know? It’s times like this where I’m pretty glad I don’t coat my arrows with poison.”

She didn’t mean to smile, but the twitch at the corner of her mouth turned into a grin and when he looked up and shot her a crooked, almost tired smile, laughter bubbled up from deep in her belly.

Wiping the tears from her eyes, she put her knife at his throat again and fisted her hand into the front of his shirt. Tilting the chair, and him in it, she brought her face within inches of his. He was heavy, but Natalia was stronger than she looked. “Give me something useful and I might let you have a decent burial back home. Instead of having your body parts buried in a dozen different spots in the forest.”

“This isn’t you, this isn’t who you are. You’re better than this.”

“Of the two of us, I’m pretty sure I know who I am the best.” Her voice was cold enough to freeze water. She was the Black Widow; the fact that he had made her laugh did not stop her from killing him. The Red Room might believe that they pulled her strings, but she could disappear in a second if she wanted to. SHIELD might have sent their best tracker after her, but look where he’d ended up.

A drop of sweat escaped from the short hairs of his sideburn, ran along the ear. It hung from the earlobe for a couple of seconds before it fell, hitting the carpet without a sound.

Natalia met his gaze again. The expression was still calm, his body slumped in the chair like he was relaxing with friends, not the target of a hostile interrogation. Oh, he was good. Not as good as her, but still very good. It was almost a shame she had to kill him.

“Look, Fury will probably kill me for this, but you could work for us instead. The pay isn’t all that good, but you won’t have to track down and assassinate dissidents, fleeing the system that has killed their children.”

“Stop talking.”

“No I won’t, because you need to hear this. Being the best spy, assassin, or whatever isn’t all there is to life. There’s friends who will have your back even when you mess up, _especially_ when you mess up. And not having to do things that you know deep in your fucking gut is wrong.” His voice became steadily more insistent as he spoke.

Natalia realized it wasn’t because he was afraid she would kill him. It was because he would make damn sure she understood what she was turning down.

Had she ever been this passionate about anything in her life? It was hard to tell, because her memories had been messed with so much it sometimes felt like it was mostly scar tissue and blank spots. And that was just it: her passion for the cause had gone, erased along with her memories. Perhaps this was what she had been looking for. A way out. Something to make her feel again.

She cut the restraints. She would no doubt regret it in the days to come, but she cut the restraints and set the archer free.

 

3.

It started off innocently enough. Natasha and Pepper were talking in the lounge at the new Avenger’s Tower when Tony had walked by. Just as Tony passed them, Natasha finished a joke she’d begun before he entered the room and Pepper had laughed loudly enough for him to hear. Tony’s entire back went stiff and he faltered mid step.

So the next time he walked by while Pepper and Natasha was talking, Natasha leaned closer to Pepper and lowered her voice. Just to see how he’d react. He’d narrowed his eyes and tried to join in the conversation, making Natasha excuse herself and leave.

After a few rounds of this, he stopped trying to insert himself into the conversation, stopped coming by at all. The next logical step for Natasha was of course to start carrying a portable jammer. It interrupted the signals of any nearby microphones or other listening devices, but what made it especially useful was the white noise it provided to disrupt any surveillance device outside its range. She only turned it on when she was talking with Pepper.

He almost confronted her about the jammer several times. Natasha could see how much he wanted to, but he held back. What was he to say? He couldn’t very well complain about her using a jammer, because then he would have to admit to trying to spy on them. And that might lead to Pepper finding out. That particular conundrum was very visible in the twitch under his right eye whenever he watched the two of them talk.

The fun lasted almost two full weeks, then Tony began to ignore them. With hunched shoulders at first, but getting more relaxed as time passed. Nothing bad had happened, so he stopped expecting it to.

That was when Natasha decided to teach Pepper self-defense.

Non-offensive moves, for the most part, just ways to deal with an attacker. Give her time to run to safety while the hypothetical attacker was nursing a sore part of his body. Essential tricks for a CEO of a major company. Couldn’t just rely on her security detail, when it could be taken out.

That got his twitch back within minutes of them hitting the gym.

When that eventually would stop to working, she could always teach Pepper how to shoot a gun. Also essential for someone famous and dating a superhero, and not at all bad for Tony’s blood pressure.

 

4.

The sting had been simple on paper and it had almost turned out simple in execution. Except that one of the mark’s bodyguards had spotted the backup Natasha had insisted she didn’t need and now the mission was in shambles. The three armed men weren’t a problem, but she still needed information from the mark and she would prefer to get out with the captured SHIELD agent still breathing.

With a sigh, Natasha stopped pretending to be scared by the armed guards. The mark was yet to realize that the flirting conversation had been an interrogation, but it was just a matter of time. Might as well take charge of the situation. She deactivated the photostatic veil and pulled the flimsy fabric off her face, turning to the mark on the couch beside her.

“I’ll tell you what. You tell me about the ‘project’ you have going in Berlin and I’ll let you walk out of here alive,” she lied. That man was going to a SHIELD holding facility, or failing that an early grave, but it usually helped the process to pretend otherwise.

“Yeah? I don’t see any of your super powered friends. Signaling them won’t help, this place is a fortress, nothing gets in or out without my say so.”

Natasha smiled at him, presenting her teeth in a smile that would have made a shark proud. “I seem to have gotten inside. And I don’t need any of my _friends_ to get you to talk.”

The smarts that had brought the mark to his current position of power made him frown for a second before his machismo took over. “Listen, lady. I know about your reputation, but you’re not scaring me.”

He was wrong, of course he was. The Black Widow title wasn’t something one was given, it was something one  _earned_. She would just have to teach him how scared he really should be.

Before he had a chance to do anything stupid, she flung a Taser Disk at him and leapt off the couch with a foot aimed at the guard pointing a gun at the agent. The guard moved and the kick landed on his nose instead of his temple. He fell to the ground moaning as Natasha rounded on the remaining two. Her Widow’s Bite made short work of them and they quickly joined the first one on the floor.

Pausing only to place a second Taser Disk on the mark, she tied up and gagged the three guards. It wouldn’t do to have some of the other guards in the mansion interrupt her work. Now that she couldn’t get the information the easy way, she would have to do it the hard way. And the hard way could get messy.

In the end the mark did learn just how scared he should be of the Black Widow. He was begging the extraction team to take him away when Natasha finally called them in. She hadn’t even hurt him that much. At worst he would have a slight limp, at best he would spend the rest of his life only hindered by the prison time that waited for him at the other end of that transport. Either way, the people of Berlin were safe from him and that was all that mattered.

 

5.

The ceiling was made up of white tiles with tiny holes in it, they blurred together when Natasha tried to count them. There was something on her right, a sound that kept pulling at her attention. Oh, a heart rate monitor. _Her_ heart rate monitor. The room came into focus – the antiseptic smell, the machinery, the white everything. Her stupid hero stunt had landed her in a hospital.

She tried to push herself up to survey the room and was rewarded by an icicle stabbing into her side. Her groan had barely left her lips before a hand was pushing her back into the pillows, gently but firmly.

“Don’t move,” James said. Sweet, worried James who had apparently not even left her side to change out of his uniform. The familiar smell of gunpowder still clung to him.

“Help me sit up then,” she said with a tired smile that only deepened the frown he was wearing.

He took the remote off the back of the bed and moved it out of Natasha’s reach when she tried to take it from him. True to form, he stopped the bed at a lower angle than she would have picked. Maybe it was for the best, while the icicle in her side had gone away again, there was still a distinct pressure that only got worse as she sat up. Not that she would have let that stop her.

The incline meant she could scan the room without straining her shredded abdominal muscles. James was her only visitor, but her trip to the hospital had not gone unnoticed. Flowers filled a table in the corner with balloons floating above them. Two with the classic “Get well soon” and one with “Congratulations!” where “You’re an idiot” has been added in Clint’s blocky handwriting.

Natasha’s smile faded when she shifted her gaze back to James. He was turning over the remote, flipping it again and again, plastic clicking against metal with each turn.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he finally said, his voice rough.

She reached out and took his free hand, assuring him that she was right here. “But you didn’t. I’m fine.”

“You almost bled out before we got you to the hospital. If Sam hadn’t been there…” He didn’t finish the sentence. Clenching his jaw, like he was cutting off any further words wanting to escape.

She wanted to joke about how she wasn’t that easy to kill, but James wasn’t meeting her gaze, only rubbing circles on the back of her hand with his thumb. “You know I had to do it. They would have killed those kids if I didn’t stop them.”

He didn’t answer, just frowned. He would have put himself between her and the bullet that had ripped up her right side if he’d had the chance. Without hesitation, without regrets. Not because he thought Natasha needed his protection, but because a bullet in her body hurt him more than a bullet in his.

So she’d made sure he hadn’t had a chance.

The bad guys had wanted her anyway, so they hadn’t been trying to kill her. James would just have been an obstacle, one they would have done their best to eradicate. Even with all his skills and smarts, that had not been a risk she’d been willing to let him take.

Natasha tugged at his hand and he came closer, no doubt aware of how bad an idea it would be for her to put any strength behind it. Slipping her hand from his to around his neck, she pulled his face down to hers. Whispering, “I’m sorry, I didn’t think it would go this badly,” before she kissed him.

There was a morphine drip attached to her right arm – it did little compared to James’ lips on hers, his fingers in her hair, his hard breaths on her skin. The bed shifted as he sat down on it, careful not to put any weight on her, even with the wound being on her other side.

Natasha had survived her recklessness and he would eventually forgive her for it. Just like she’d forgiven him each time he’d done something equally reckless. It was who they were, as big a part of them as the bond that held them together.

When she could return to active duty, James would no doubt spend half the time watching out for her. In the meantime, she would just have to accept that one of the most dangerous men she’d ever known would rather focus on wrapping her in a blanket instead of using those skills to keep the world safe. She might as well enjoy it too, because even without the wound in her side, there wasn’t a damn thing Natasha could do to stop him.

 

+1

“Six points,” Maria said, her voice tinny over the earpiece.

Natasha turned away from the now very unconscious HYDRA agent. “Only six? Were you watching the right feed? He nearly pissed himself.”

“The key word here is ‘nearly’. He didn’t drop his weapon, only froze and stared at you. It’s only six points because I’m feeling generous.”

Natasha huffed and continued down the empty corridor, checking each office for less combatant HYDRA agents. “Someone is afraid of losing her bet, and I’m pretty sure it’s not me.”

“I didn’t make the rules.”

“That’s funny. The list you showed me just this morning seemed a bit too specific to have been pulled off the internet.”

Maria didn’t get to answer, because a group of no less than five HYDRA agents turned the corner. The big one at the front only grinned when he saw her, and Natasha swore under her breath. That was at least three points off. She’d better make this good.

The two behind him had been smart enough to patrol with their guns in their hands and she threw a couple of Taser Discs at them as she ran towards them. Proving just how stupid he was, the big man squared off against her instead of drawing his gun. When she was just outside his reach, Natasha jumped and wrapped her legs around his neck. His hands brushed her side just as she jabbed the Widow’s Bite stingers into his thick neck.

Riding his convulsing body to the ground, she looked up at the last two as her feet hit the ground. Her smile almost froze their feet to the ground. Their eyes darted between her and their fallen comrades behind her before they turned and ran. Earning Natasha two straight nines. Excellent.

A groan behind her alerted Natasha to the fact that _someone_ didn’t know when to stay down. She turned and kicked him so hard he almost flew backwards, a loud crack rang out as his head smacked into the floor.

Satisfied, Natasha turned and ran after the last two.

“Now that was just sloppy work, Agent Romanoff,” Maria said as Natasha rounded the corner.

“I’d like to see you do better.”

The other corridor was empty, but there were scuff marks from black soles turning quickly on light gray flooring outside the second door to the right.

“I’ll have you know that Captain America himself says I would be outstanding in the field.”

Natasha turned the handle and swung the door open while keeping out of sight of the room’s occupants. The wall on the other side of the hallway was sprayed with bullets. “I think your focus group might be slightly biased,” she said, pulled the pin on a flashbang and threw it into the room.

“I think my focus group is your team leader. And you’re still sixteen points short. Better get a move on, Romanoff.”

They were still haggling when Natasha met up with the rest of the team. Even with the five points Maria redacted for quote, unquote ‘failing to keep track of enemies’ Natasha still won the bet and she almost didn’t gloat about it. Almost.

**Author's Note:**

> The characters in this fic are the same as the ones in my other fic [I Come With Knives](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3779635). As this one takes place both before and after ICWK and it works as a stand-alone, I have not posted it as a part of the series. (Fair warning: ICWK has Bucky starting out considerably less friendly than he is in this one and there's graphic violence and smut.)


End file.
